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User blog:LeMansRacer/Forza Wiki - Car Articles
Car Articles! We like making them, and people like reading them! So here's a few small changes we can introduce to make them both easier to make, more engaging to read, and more connected to each other. Infobox The old infobox takes up a lot of screen space on desktop, if not making up the majority of many articles. These boxes are meant to be brief synopsis of information that would be otherwise buried under paragraphs of typing. The new smaller, and more bespoke design, helps keep things clear without oversimplifying our content. It is has also been reorganised to be more about the car itself rather than the categories or classifications imposed on it across the various Forza games. Having said that, do you think these boxes should have specifications directly from the game as their source or be based on specifications sourced from the internet? What else does it do? Well, it can generate categories straight from the information given to it. This way it pushes our process of organising articles into a more autonomous method and reduces errors we might make when inputting each category by ourselves. Description Not really much I'd like to impose as part of changing the car articles. Mostly just adding a template to make this section stand out a little more as something sourced from an outside source such as forzamotorsport.net. Statistics This section was really a large part that I wanted to consolidate, mostly because it's a bit confusing to look at three separate sections for up to ten different games worth of information. I've put together a means of merging all three sections together in what could be a much more manageable form of expressing the various aspects of a car across multiple games. The template works per game, and each section allows for its game to have information represented in a manner that may vary in importance or be unique to the needs of that game. For example, we can show each region of rarity for a car that's featured in Forza Motorsport 2, show how many medals is required to unlocked it in Forza Motorsport 6: Apex, and show which Forzathon challenge has to be beaten to unlock an Horizon Edition in Forza Horizon 3. Conversion A section that I've left out of the statistics table as it's important to show what cars can be altered through conversion, but also not bloat the statistics table with too much information. A simple and small conversion table allows for multiple sections, in the same way as the statistics table, to help organise information per game and per aspect that may be altered. Categories This is the biggest section I would like to have improved. I said in a previous blog post that I would like to have a more comprehensive wiki to help make a place worth visiting in the Forza community. This is the first step towards that - categories. Categories can be generated to help organise articles for ourselves to keep track of content, but they can also be used by users to navigate to additional articles. The infobox and statistics templates are meant to also automate the creation of these categories, and as that takes a big work load off of us when writing articles, we can use them to go more in-depth with the amount of information on offer. Maybe you're looking at the Shelby Cobra 427 S/C, and you're wondering to yourself - "Wow, what an awesome car, I wonder what it's on par with." - then users can scroll down to the base of an article and see categories for its PI class in each game, see what else was built in the 1960s, maybe have a look at what else is within a 500 lbs of it, or look at other Shelby brand cars. Not everything has been added to these templates for category generation, but I'll be adding a list soon of categories I would like them to make with information they're given. Little Things Other things I'd like to impose a change on are; *A uniform gallery style - There are multiple ways to make a gallery, but some uniformity between articles would look good. *Drop the model range navbox - They're an aspect of the Need for Speed Wiki that was created to help ease confusion between similarly named cars through the series' twenty-plus year run. A manufacturer navbox would be more appropriate here. Conclusion Please comment with what you feel should be changed with the car articles. I've made a blog post with what I would like to add to gain a consencious from other editors before imposing any changes. The comparison was made with the McLaren P1 as it's a very fleshed out article, and the same article, with the templates changes, can be seen at User:LeMansRacer/Sandbox7. A test page for excessive usage of these templates can be seen at User:LeMansRacer/Sandbox5. As always, thanks for reading this far, and here's a reading-all-the-way-to-the-bottom reward cover song... (jump to 3:18 for the bit everyone knows). Category:Blog posts Category:Community News